Value as Gedankenbild or Gedankentatsache

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Wed Nov 25 20:57:02 PST 1998


Dear Paula, I cannot now summarize Colletti's exploration of the reduction of value or abstract labor to a mental fact--I would have to think about it for weeks. This is a very difficult issue, requiring some very hard thought. Some who have given the idea real critical interrogation include

1. Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, p. 79ff 2. Henryk Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of Capitalist Society, p. 103 3. William J Blake, An American Looks at Karl Marx, p. 85ff.

And now putatively because via matrix algebra the neo Ricardians need only refer to the class distribution of income, not labor values themselves, to render prices and factor incomes determinate, there is a new critique of labor value as superfluous, if not metaphysical.

I do agree that all this debate needs to be dealt with in one manuscript from Sombart to Sraffa, from Bernstein to Robinson. I am not the person to do this. Unfortunately.

best, rakesh

ps here is a nice juxtaposition of interpretations of the meaning of Marx's law of value; my agreement is obviously with the latter as it represents, as Max Adler would have put it, a dynamic proletarian scientific outlook, not the static bourgeois one from which Schumpeter tried so hard to extricate himself:

"the law of value is essentially a theory of general equilibrium"--Paul Sweezy, 1942

"Value is not the law of equilibrium of economics, in Marx, as it is in other systems. It is the fact that labor can never be manifested, except by exchange, and under a form that negatives the exchange of time for time, that characterizes value as summing up of disequilibrium, of the sum of contradictions between labor time and the private production which ascertain that labor time, not directly but by way of other commodities.
>From value to form of value, from that to money, from money to profit, from
profit to purchase of labor, from that to contradictions of production and consumption, thence to crises and unemployment, this is an unbroken chain beginning with the theory of value as the SOCIALIST CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION." William J Blake, 1939



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